A man and geisha, ca 1714. Found in the Collection of British Museum. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
“Sex is where the weirdness of the Japanese peaks,” wrote A.A. Gill in his notorious “Mad in Japan” essay. Gill went on to catalogue largely anecdotal evidence of what he saw, on his brief visit, as a warped obsession with sex and a culture hard-wired to objectify and infantilise women who were, he asserted, seen simply as handmaidens or sex toys. Such characterisations, once typical, would now generally be dismissed as Japanophobic tropes — but occasionally a story will come along that seems to add fire to Gill’s wisps of smoke.
The Japanese government is considering raising the age of consent from 13 to 16 as part of a package of sex crime reforms. Yes, you read that right, the age of consent in Japan is currently 13, one of the lowest in the world and the lowest in the G7. A justice ministry panel is also recommending redefining rape to make court judgements more consistent. As it stands, it must be proved that not only was sex non-consensual, but that the victim had been unable to resist due to “violence or intimidation”. The new law will allow courts to consider drugging, intoxication, “catching the victim off-guard” and psychological manipulation in their definition. Voyeurism will also be outlawed.
That Japan is only now updating its laws is troubling, as it suggests a society indifferent to the fate of vulnerable minors and sexual assault victims. Just last week, a former J-pop star Kauan Okamoto claimed to have been sexually abused by the now-deceased music producer Johnny Kitagawa when he was 15. He thinks many more boys who worked for Kitagawa were also abused, but were afraid that speaking out would ruin their fledgling pop careers. “I believe that almost all of the boys who went to stay at Johnny’s place were victims,” he told reporters . “I would say 100 to 200 boys stayed there on a rotation basis during my four years at the agency.”
All this appears to add substance to the implications of the “weird Japan” reportage that fixates on the seedy elements of Japanese culture, such as the popularity of disturbingly young girl bands who cavort scantily clad in glossy videos. (Some members of the J-pop band NMB48 are just 14.) But as ever with Japan, things are not what they seem. The salacious Orientalist myth needs to be separated from the more prosaic reality. For one thing, it’s not exactly true to say the age of consent in Japan is 13. Most prefectures (or counties) interpret laws against “lewd acts” to include sex with minors. This means the real age of consent in much of the country is 18 — though penalties for “lewd acts” are generally lighter.
Still, that hardly explains why Japan’s sex crime laws haven’t been updated since the late Meiji period. The answer may lie in Japan’s traditional “black box” attitude to sexual crime. In a culture where direct expressions of opinion or intent are considered impolite and injurious to societal harmony, and everything is caveated or left unsaid, it is often considered too difficult to determine what happens in the “black box” of an intimate encounter between two individuals. The police and judiciary would rather not be asked to get involved — and nebulous sex crime laws that deter victims from coming forward have long suited them. Of course, it also benefitted predatory men.
Then there is the fact that the public was, until recently, largely unaware of the flaws of the outdated laws. Japan has a low official rate of sex crime at 1.02 per 100,000 citizens (the UK’s figure is 27), and horrific stories of abuse do not appear on the news. Nor does sexual abuse ever feature as a storyline in TV dramas. In the absence of compelling evidence of a problem, the dusty old ordinance remained on the statute books as there simply wasn’t any clamour for change.
